Case Study | Presto Chango, Limoncello!

At the close of a recent meal at Cathy Whims’s standout Italian restaurant Nostrana in Portland, Ore., my table-mates and I found ourselves seeking a bibulous dessert of some type. Usually that would mean vin santo for me, but as I was dining with a distiller, I thought the house-made limoncello I spied on the menu might be of greater interest. It’s one of those things you never think about, limoncello, until it pops up as a suddenly great idea: that dazzling bright yellow, half-frozen, lemony tang, like an adult slushie. Though it is also sweet, its penetrating citrine pop cuts like the Jaws of Life at the close of a hearty meal.

Its heyday here was certainly back in the Hammer-pants era, when all things Italian began to have their big moment. Its historical niche, however, was as a type of across-the-board greeting tot that each household would have on hand for any guest who happened by in the very long age before e-mail. Nowadays, it’s invariably taken as a digestivo after meals, though it can be marvelous in cocktails (I particularly like to jury-rig a cognac-based sidecar with it) and has its uses in the kitchen as well. My father’s family in Florence always called it limoncino, while down the Amalfi coast, in Sorrento, (as well as here in America, where most Italian-American families immigrated from the south), it’s called limoncello. This confused me for years. A little recent digging points to another of the endless north/south linguistic schisms; it’s the same stuff.

Biking up the Ligurian coast with a friend many years ago, pedaling too late, we got lost all night among the labyrinthine terraced lemon orchards in Le Cinque Terre. It was like being in a bizarre, lemon-scented dream. This is where it comes from, those specific, elongated lemons like Femminello Santa Teresa they grow there right on the Mediterranean. Odd specificities like this liqueur make exquisite sense in their own environs; when life gives you lemons, lots of them, make this searing, addictive postprandial liqueur out of them. Nothing simpler: spirit, lemon, sugar. You peel the lemons, drop the peels into a very strong neutral spirit of some kind (grappa, vodka, Everclear), seal it and leave it for a number of days or months, depending on whom you consult, strain it out and add sugar water, stick it in the freezer and voilà, or more appropriately, ecco: limoncello. It can be great or not so great, too bitter or too sweet, not lemony enough or too strong. But it’s kind of like pancakes; even the most imperfect versions are great, and you’re always immensely pleased to find yourself sipping one. I’ve never had much truck with the commercial varieties; there are dozens, and though some might be quite decent, the few I’ve tried have been too sweet, not enough bite. Besides, what are you going to do, buy boxed pancakes? It’s one of those things your uncle Enzo makes, or barring that, you have to yourself.

Upon entering Nostrana, I had filed past its impressively towering bar and noticed, without knowing what I was looking at, a number of huge, covered glass urns with odd muslin hammocks hanging within, suspended above a few inches of liquid. Hmm, I pondered, some kind of nutty amaro experiments going on there? This is Portland, after all, where the only form of slacking that draws opprobrium is not making your own bitters, vermouths, tinctures and amari. After one sip of this beguiling, clearish-amber limoncello, which was eye-poppingly citric, with a force and clarity of flavor I’d never experienced in this drink before, I wandered back up to that bar to inquire about the recipe. Enter those strange jars. It happened that Douglas Derrick, the bar manager, had chanced across a brief aside in the afterword of Giulianno Bugialli’s 1984 tome “Foods of Italy,” describing in the roughest outline this very old manner of making citrus liqueur in Sicily, whereby they hang the fruit above the spirit for nine weeks to three months — whole lemons, not touching the liquid at all — in a closed jar, and the transfer takes place by what’s technically known in the trade as D.S.M., or Delicious Scientific Magic.

“Pure oil, no bitter pith,” Derrick explained.

“But how does it work,” I asked. “Some kind of osmosis?”

“No idea, basically,” he told me. “We just started doing it a year ago, we’re still experimenting with it, kind of hit-and-miss, but mostly hit.”

I had to figure this out. Or rather, I had to bother someone sharper than me about organic chemistry who could explain it to me. Enter Don Lee, who is the resident science brain at Cocktail Kingdom. Lee had never heard of anything like this technique for maceration, either, but conjectured that since alcohol, especially at very high proof, volatilizes quite naturally, even at ambient or room temperature, what you’re creating in the enclosed jar is a process similar to that which a Carter-head still uses to extract the essential oils from aromatic botanicals in making certain types of gin, whereby the alcohol vapors pass through a suspended basket filled with the dried botanicals, hanging within the still but not submerged directly in the spirit, and yet manage to neatly extract the aromatics. In other words, D.S.M.

The original recipe in Bugialli’s book was for a mandarin orange liqueur, but in practice one could use the same method on any citrus fruit to make an array of liqueurs. Bear in mind, however, that you need enough room in whatever vessel you’re using to hang enough of the fruits to give it the proper punch. If you’ve pomelocello in mind, you’d better have a pretty big jar. Moreover, citrus, as one tends to forget in this culture of constant availability, is a winter crop. As the months get colder, the citrus available at market improves steadily. The enterprising leapfrog would be to start batches now to bottle up for the holidays, for either imbibing or regaling.

It helps to have another pair of hands while setting this up, but once you’ve gotten the initial setup in place, it takes care of itself. Pour the spirit into the well-cleaned urn. Drape the cheesecloth in crossing swaths, making sure to gauge the length so that once the weight of the lemons is pending, they cannot reach the spirit. Bind the cheesecloth tightly in place on the outside edge of the urn with the butcher’s twine, wrapping it under a lip to make certain it is well held. Place the lemons into their hammock and cap the whole with the lid. If the lid has a plastic or rubber gasket, you may wish to remove it, lest it leach any off-flavors into the mix. Store in a stable environment out of sunlight for nine weeks. Given variables like temperature and humidity, your limoncello may be ready before then. Warmer climates will speed up the process. Avoid opening the jar, as it will set the curing process back, but do pay attention to the color of the mix; you want it rich with a kind of varnished yellow, but it can actually go too far, overextracting into a brown color with an intensity that can be too much for some people’s taste.

At the end of the aging period you should have roughly 1.4 liters of unsweetened lemon spirit at roughly 60 percent alcohol by volume, or 120 proof. Make a simple syrup of ½ liter water and the same of sugar. When dissolved fully, add to the lemon spirit and mix well. Taste for strength, balance and sweetness and adjust water for dilution and/or sugar if necessary. Be cautious not to drown the lemon’s bite and aromatics with too much sugar, but also bear in mind that if you’re serving your limoncello from the freezer, you will perceive slightly less sweetness in the frozen mixture.

Note: for more precisely diluting down to taste, you can purchase a spirit hydrometer, a device like a small floating thermometer or fishing bobber, which tells you the proof or percentage of alcohol in a solution, for as little as $7 to $10 at most brewing or winemaking supply stores. You would be looking to keep the final limoncello at about 40 percent, or 80 proof.